Instant GOP stars

“I can never have too many friends in this world,” Rep. Kevin McCarthy says, as he takes another pistachio from a bowl on a small table inside his Capitol office. He has the coveted space because he’s already the chief deputy whip — No. 4 in House Republican leadership — even though he’s been around for only four years. But his ties to the leadership aren’t what will propel him to stardom if the GOP retakes the House majority in November; it will be his 39 new best friends.

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McCarthy is a master networker, and, with a safe seat at home in California, he has spent his time and money fundraising and campaigning for Republican House candidates since 2006, before he was even elected. Nearly all of the 13 Republicans elected with him in 2006 owe him. So do most of the more than 25 Republicans elected in 2008. As the party’s recruiter in 2010, he’s probably closer to new Republican lawmakers than any other GOP House member.

That’s because while he loves numbers and understands the big picture — he can rattle off how many seats the GOP won when it took the House in 1994, the percentage of districts Republicans won based on key votes that year, how many they’ll need to take the House back this year — he carefully builds personal relationships and accumulates detailed knowledge about each recruit’s situation back home.

A key success? Van Tran, a California assemblyman running against Democratic Rep. Loretta Sanchez. Tran, an immigrant whose parents left Vietnam on a military plane in the days before Saigon fell, lives in California’s 47th District, which has the highest concentration of Vietnamese-Americans in the country. When McCarthy sat down to find someone to challenge Sanchez in a district that gave 60 percent of its vote to Obama in 2008 but voted for Bush in 2004, Tran was a natural fit: a popular elected official with a natural base beyond the party itself.

“You have to encourage the right people in the right districts,” McCarthy says. He recalls a top House Democrat approaching him after Tran announced he would run, acknowledging the seat would become more difficult for Democrats to hold: “Van Tran — now that one hurt,” the Democrat said.

McCarthy will also take the time to personally coach new recruits in creative ways that go beyond typical national support for a House candidate. Take “The Real World” star Sean Duffy, another recruiting success: The telegenic champion lumberjack agreed to jump into a long-shot race against Rep. Dave Obey (D-Wis.), the powerful Appropriations Committee chairman who was first elected in 1969.

McCarthy’s advice? “That was the year we landed on the moon,” he says. “It’s old versus new. I called him and told him to go get a campaign car from 1969. ... We were even reworking the R.E.M. song ‘Man on the Moon.’”